After a few years back in
England he was recruited as an Operations Supervisor at the Honeysuckle Creek
Manned Spaceflight tracking station.

John supported all the Apollo
missions at the main Operations Console, and had the unique experience of talking
to Young and Duke on the lunar surface during Apollo 16.

After Skylab, and some unmanned
missions such as Viking, John moved to the Canberra Deep Space Communications
Complex in 1980 working as an Operations Supervisor on all of the Deep Space
missions from the mid 70s to retirement as Operations Manager in 1995.

At various times during his
career with NASA and for 23 years after retirement, John spent
varying periods at several NASA centres consulting on tracking operations and
equipment.

AA
 After Apollo (actually after 30 years with NASA).

John retired in 1995 as operations
manager of the Canberra Deep Space Communications Centre, and after 2 years
consulting at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, took up his current very
busy life fixing PC hardware and software problems and teaching Internet, etc.

Personally I have always
picked Apollo 8 with 15 a close second. Why 8?

1. An incredibly gutsy decision
to go beyond the 850 mile altitude record  everything had to work!

2. Selfishly, it was the first
time that the 85 ft antennae would assume the role that they had been built
to do, and we had been preparing for 2 plus years.

3. Due to a combination of
celestial mechanics and luck, we at HSK had the lions share
of that mission. There was always competition between the sites to be the prime
site for major mission events.

4. At HSK we saw the first
lunar pass including the first time that an Apollo spacecraft came out from
occultation from behind the moon (spot on time  indicating that the LOI
burn was good).

5. Actually I was about 5
seconds away from being the first person to talk to someone in lunar orbit!
We had configured redundant voice equipment (meant for the LM) to be used in
the event that the spacecraft might be in a backup voice mode. Somehow there
was confusion about the mode, and the man at the demodulators was frantically
trying to find the correct source, while I (equally frantically) tried to select
the correct intercom channel to remote to Houston. I can still hear the Voice
of Apollo PAO commentary saying we have data but no voice yet...

My fingers hovered over the
local voice uplink buttons, ready to reassure the crew that we were sorting
things out. But we persisted for a few more seconds and then the crew were able
to talk to Houston normally. There  our dirty washing is now out there
for all to see!

6. I believe we were also
the prime site for the final orbit and Acquisition of signal after the critical
TEI burn  another tense moment.

7. But most of all 
even though most of us missed a lot of Christmas with our families, most of
us (religious or not), would not have missed Frank Bormans reading from
Genesis. Probably one of the best moments of all the missions  including
A-13.

But 15 was a close second
 major increases in complexity with the extra CSM experiments and the
weird Rover voice and data configurations + the first time the TV was 1/2 way
decent. It was great to see Ed Fendell really hammering up the real time commands.
Pan left... Pan left... Tilt up.... Zoom in... Zoom in.... Iris open.... etc.

A couple of years before we
had built a local simulation system to emulate that (took the NASA aircraft
simulation teams by surprise  we could checkout what they were doing up
there in the Super Constellation via the TV system). So it was good to see the
real thing happening over a rather longer distance.

Apollo
16

John spoke with the Apollo
16 crew (John Young and Charlie Duke) in the LM on the lunar surface during
a comms outage with Houston.